The current debate over banning artificial intelligence in schools reminds me of another heated discussion a while back that took place within schools: sex education.
Let me explain.
There was a time when abstinence-only sex-ed was the agreed-upon approach in many schools. If we didn’t want kids to get pregnant or contract an STI, we taught them to abstain from sex. Period.
We now know that simply saying “Don’t do this” to children is not an effective way to prevent them from doing that very thing. As a mom and a former classroom teacher, I could have told you that.
Today, bans on AI are trying this same framework, assuming that removing AI from the classroom means that kids won’t use it for schoolwork. That approach may put up a speed bump for students looking for an easy answer, but it won’t prevent them from accessing the same tool at home or on a personal device. It’s like whack-a-mole; you can block it in one spot, but it will pop up somewhere else. In a nationally representative study completed before Los Angeles and New York City announced AI bans, of the 44% of teenagers who said they had had a tool banned at school, 59% of those same teens said they’d accessed the tool anyway on a personal device.
I support bans in that they can help schools buy time to figure out how to do AI literacy. Yet the hard truth about AI bans is this: You can “ban” or pause AI in schools, but that doesn’t stop kids from using it, just like we’ve learned with abstinence-only sex ed. Ban or no ban, we have to teach students how to safely navigate this new world.
Since the AI bans in New York City Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District in early September, parents and educators alike have been spinning on the same question: What’s safe for kids, and what responsibility do we have to our kids when it comes to AI, knowing that they’ll use it anyway?
The Macro Risks, and the Micro Risks
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that the pace of AI development was too fast — that frontier AI companies needed to slow development and build in more safeguards so that the AI can’t become too powerful. I’d argue that AI also needs more safeguards before it can be used by kids and teens, even for everyday, seemingly banal queries. I get the macro risk of AI as a geopolitical threat, or becoming sentient, and I don’t dispute the risks are real and frightening.
But we can’t overstate the significant risks to kids when they use AI. For the past six months, the Youth AI Safety Institute, which is part of Common Sense Media, where I’m the chief program officer, has been studying the leading AI products designed specifically for teens and general-population tools, such as ChatGPT for Teens and Google’s Gemini with teen protections, to evaluate them for safety. Think of the institute as the “crash test dummies” for AI. We’ve found time and time again that leading AI chatbots miss signals of suicidal ideation, indulge signs of psychosis, offer incorrect information around eating disorder support and complete all the homework assignments they are given. For example, the institute found that ChatGPT for Teens promised to alert parents about “dangerous” chats, but then failed to deliver notifications when testers simulated crisis conversations.
Whether your concern is more about cheating or more about kids turning to chatbots when they could be turning to a trusted friend or adult, the risks are real. While AI development across the industry has dramatically increased in speed — so much so that the industry is now self-regulating to slow itself down — safety improvements for kids seem to be moving at a glacial speed.
A Block Isn’t a Lesson
Removing AI from schools is an effective way to give school leaders time to figure out what successful implementation looks like in the classroom, but that only solves one side of the equation. An outright ban doesn’t do enough to protect and prepare kids for the real world they live in, one with AI integrated into nearly every popular app and website.
Putting a pause on AI in school doesn’t remove the need to teach kids about AI — what I call “AI literacy.” Some see that phrase and think, “Why would we teach kids how to use tools that we aren’t allowing them to use?” But AI literacy isn’t just about using technology; it’s about teaching kids how to grow up in an increasingly AI-driven world.
AI literacy involves educating students on topics such as navigating deepfake images on the internet; understanding why AI acts like a friend, even though it’s actually a large language model with a slick chat interface on top; thinking critically about when AI can be an aid to creativity, and when it’s doing the creative work wholesale; and learning how to identify bias or misinformation in an AI-generated answer.
New York City’s AI pause requires high schools to teach two 45-minute lessons each year to help students navigate this new world. It’s a good start, but not sufficient. Pause or no pause, students use AI by default every time they do a Google search. They use AI when creating posts with Lenses on Snapchat. And they definitely use AI to complete homework assignments from home.
We can stick our heads in the sand and assume that a pause will keep kids safe, or we can do the work to equip them with the critical thinking and AI literacy skills to navigate this changing world. Banning AI and then hoping kids stay safe is a story we’ve seen before. Let’s write a different ending. Teach kids what AI is. Teach them why AI flattens their critical thinking. Teach them why it acts like a friend, but isn’t. Then remind them that they can always make their own choices.